Synchronicity, and other stories
by Senri
Summary: They followed each other. A collection of Animorphs shorts. Ratings and warnings at chapter heads. Chapter one: Visser Three and Elfangor. Chapter two: Rachel/Tobias, "as time goes by".
1. Synchronicity

In the years after Esplin took Alloran, he began vaguely to wish that he had found some way to take Elfangor instead. This desire only surfaced after said Andalite did as well, from his twenty solid years of anonymity, and even then it was an almost-intangible, wishful thing as Esplin watched Elfangor explode into a mad and slapdash genius. It would have been a pleasure to take that twitchy, adaptable mind and snap it in two or eat it alive. Although he didn't believe in fate, or psychic phenomena he knew that the young Andalite prince was probably the truest enemy he would ever face in his life. He was sure of it when Elfangor balked him at Tuner Port, and he that he was up to the challenge when his own forces swarmed in a crushing victory over the moon base around Manda. They hadn't set eyes on each other for three years.

And the hunger never stopped, the urge to consume and immolate Elfangor, make him a part of Esplin because he was _that worthy. That dangerous._ He was too good, too noble, too strong, and still too kind under it all to be allowed to live. Esplin strained and ached and nearly went mad with the hunger in him, the hunger to possess, to _know_. He had studied Andalites all his life- it was how he had won his position, how he had won so many battles against them. It was what gave him his edge. And he wanted to know Elfangor.

He felt it when the prince fell: he watched the small fighter ship tumble out from space and spiral towards earth's surface. He watched avidly as it disappeared against a large land mass and ordered it followed. Nobody really knew how the mental contact necessary for Andalite thought-speech could bond people; it wasn't of much interest to the race and if someone had been interested, all able scientists had been commandeered to help with the war effort. Esplin thought a bond had been made, though; you couldn't hate someone that much without knowing them, and a healthy Yeerk didn't forget much. Didn't forget much at all.

By the time he got to the planet's surface and looked down at the suffering Andalite, Esplin thought he knew him enough.


	2. As Time Goes By

Genre: Angst/Romance  
Warnings: Rated T; contains sex.  
Pairing: Rachel/Tobias  
Notes: Gift fic.

* * *

He started forgetting. It was a hawk thing to do.

* * *

Forgetting was what saved him, in that maelstrom of grief – the hawk coming forward, cloaking him in hunger and ferocity, a familiar friend and ally against what could not be countenanced. The hawk drew him onwards, fed, flew, keened fiercely into the wind, with no recollection of nor interest in what troubled the weaker consciousness that shared a body with it.

But oh, God, what else could he have done? Remembering, always, it would have killed him. If he had to think ceaselessly of her (the way she was keen, and sweat-sweetened on his tongue) he would have gone permanently into the churning morass that was the remainder of his reason. It would have killed him, or struck him with lightning's cold tragedy, and left him deaf, and blind, and dumb.

The hawk forgot. The hawk saved him.

* * *

But oh, God, the blue sin of her eyes, her luminescent skin.

(She led him into the woods one day, maybe two weeks before the end. A green jacket zipped up under her chin, ragged dusty jeans, her nails somehow smooth ovals still, and clean underneath. Her hand in his, light as a bird, but still, unstruggling.

They walked for a long way, back into the woods until he couldn't hear the Hork-Bajir calling to each other anymore, into where the sun painted the forest floor pinto and dapple. He swallowed, feeling – a hollow kind of expectancy well up, underneath his belly. Cassie and Jake had walked into the woods together too.

"Where are we going?" he said.

"I found a spot," she told him, not glancing back, confident he'd follow her lead. She's planned this, he realized. We're going to a good spot and we're going to. And. He stopped thinking there because she'd stopped too.

"X marks the spot," she told him, turning around and favoring him with a direct view of her smirk and her challenge. There really was an x, carved into one tree's trunk. The clearing was small, and leafy, very still.

He tipped his chin up when her fingers went to the waist of his bike shorts. He wasn't really dressed and felt shockingly naked compared to her, with her layers and layers between her skin and the world. He just had spandex. But he was tingling with wanting, and ready for her.

"Let's do it," she said, and she was laughing a little, and a little sad. The old never-innocent all-purpose catch phrase, she'd attack this too, take it head on, make it hers. "Let's _go._"

He could never refuse her anything.)

* * *

He kept on flying, because if it didn't offer the solace of _her_ it was the way, his way, of occlusion. Hurling himself into the blue distance and soaring up alone, looking at nothing, thoughts white noise, a hawk's simple craving for the freedom of the air.

Not looking for a copper-and-white shadow to his plunges and sallies. Not expecting, never expecting to wheel and dip his wings and find a bulky companion rolling under him.

* * *

(They had a small forever, together on that grass, rolling together, tasting touching feeling together for that first and only time. She was lightning, penumbra, tawny summer acolyte, Amazon queen, resting her hands loosely on his chest and rocking in a slow delicious primeval way on him. That day, he could have stayed forever, his hands tight on her hips, he could have crawled into the blue milk-shadow pooled beneath one breast and taken shelter forever.

What a selfish desire, in retrospect. What a foolish, self-serving dream. Maybe if he had been the one willing to shield her, to be the strong one, he could have taken the fatal blow for her; because it would have been worth it. The world loved girls like Rachel. The world fed them, watered them, on a diet of steady adoration. She could have loved again, dazzled everyone else the way he'd been dazzled, always, from that first moment... the world didn't need him. Quiet Tobias, not really excelling at anything. Except perhaps at loving her, at which he was king.

What was he supposed to do without her? What was he supposed to be? He didn't know. There was no draw, no goal, no lodestone. Only the sun crowning the horizon and the empty sky, which had once been filled.)

* * *

He started forgetting. It was a human thing to do.

END

_September 5, 2007_


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